


Chosen

by rosabelle



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:13:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22603768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosabelle/pseuds/rosabelle
Summary: It went like this: in the summer of her sixteenth year, a girl named Eleanor would walk into the sea as the sun rose on the solstice morning and emerge with magic the likes of which hadn't been seen in centuries.There were just so many girls named Eleanor.
Relationships: Failed Female Chosen One/New Female Chosen One, Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Comments: 7
Kudos: 23
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	Chosen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ESO137001](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ESO137001/gifts).



It was such a simple prophecy.

Elle contemplated the sea. Between a gap in the tent flaps, it glimmered darkly in the thin gray light.

Such a simple prophecy, and yet so many girls had been sacrificed to it.

It went like this: in the summer of her sixteenth year, a girl named Eleanor would walk into the sea as the sun rose on the solstice morning and emerge with magic the likes of which hadn't been seen in centuries.

There were just so _many_ girls named Eleanor.

Her heart thudded furiously against her ribs, counting down the seconds.

"It's almost sunrise."

"Oh, is it?"

Elle cringed as the words left her mouth.

This wasn't part of the prophecy but it was tradition and therefore almost as important: the Eleanor of the year would stay up awaiting the dawn, meditating or contemplating her fate or… whatever else one did in this situation, and she was allowed another, older Eleanor to accompany her.

Most girls brought their mothers for this, or a grandmother or an aunt. Family. Some brought friends. Elle hadn't wanted her mother here, and she had no grandmothers, aunts, or friends. Rarely, girls went in alone. She hadn't wanted to do that, either, so she'd invited the girl she'd had a crush on since she was thirteen. To spend the night with her... sitting awake in a tent erected on the shores of the magical ocean… and to watch her either fulfill her prophetic destiny or fail in the attempt like all who'd come before her.

In hindsight, Elle could understand why this wasn't a thing most people did.

All girls named Eleanor were aware of each other but there'd always been something so… _captivating_ about Lena, and Elle had always been rather more aware of her than she ought to be. Sometimes failure made the Eleanors broken and sad, colorless versions of the girls they had been before, but Lena remained fierce and vibrant and angry and beautiful.

"Yeah." Lena checked her phone, then shoved it back in the pocket of her jeans. "You've got a half hour or so, if you're going to do this."

"What else would I do?"

"Come on," Lena said. "You think it's a real prophecy?"

"You don't?"

"Are you kidding me? It's such bullshit—seriously?" Lena scoffed when Elle hesitated. "You really think you're the chosen one?"

"Didn't you?" Elle challenged her, just for the sake of argument. "Even once?"

"It doesn't matter, because none of it's real! That's what I'm trying to tell you," Lena said, holding up her hands before Elle could argue further. "It doesn't make sense."

"I guess…" Elle bit her lip, then decided it wasn't a statement that compromised her position. "I guess I've always wondered, what it was actually like. Magic. You know, what it did."

"Exactly!" Lena seemed to take a different view of her admission, which worried Elle. "It's awfully convenient how no one seems to remember. And the prophecy? It can't be real."

"Why not?"

Lena waved her hands around in answer. When Elle stared at her, she sighed. "This!" she said, like it was an explanation.

"What?"

"Oh my god, everything," she said. "Us, Eleanors. Sunrise on the solstice. Magic water! What about this sounds real?"

"Why would they make it up?"

"Because they were scared," Lena answered.

"What would they have to be scared of, if magic wasn't real? You can't bring _back_ something that you never had to begin with."

A brief silence, punctuated only by the gentle murmur of the waves against the shore, followed as Lena reformulated her argument.

"Fine, so maybe magic was real once upon a time," she said. "I don't know. But that was hundreds of years ago now. No one even remembers how it worked. We're not missing anything."

They remembered some things, but Elle didn't really want to argue with Lena. Like… some people must've had the power of prophecy, obviously, or none of them would even be here.

Still… "So… what?" she said. "We shouldn't even try?"

"No," Lena said simply. "We shouldn't. You think it's right, what they've done to us? So they can live in this fantasy world? Look, look," she added, before Elle could argue. "Think about it. Maybe in a few hours you'll be shooting lightning bolts from your fingertips, but chances are that you won't, and then what? They act like our lives are over—but we still have to live through the rest of them. You know what that looks like."

Elle bit her lip.

Lena was arrestingly beautiful in her anger. Elle didn't think she would be as lovely in failure and that concerned her, because despite what arguments she'd made to Lena, she didn't think she was the chosen one. She wasn't sure any of them were.

"I always thought I'd be more like Josie's mom," Lena said. Her voice was softer now, sadder. "You know her? She always seems so... calm about everything."

Every Eleanor knew every other Eleanor, but everyone knew _that_ Eleanor. She'd been married for years. Decades. Then, well into her forties and too old to be pregnant for the first time, she conceived her miracle baby—and then spurned her one chance at redemption. She'd divorced her husband and named her only daughter Josephine.

"Yeah," Elle said. "Josie hates her mom."

Josie's father had simply married another Eleanor and then another after that, giving him two more daughters. Ellen and Ella, who were nine and fifteen. Still young enough to be full of potential. Josie was seventeen. Too old, too ordinary, and always overflowing with anger that her mother had broken with centuries of tradition and denied her a chance at being extraordinary.

"Don't you hate yours?" Lena asked.

"No," Elle said. "Do you?"

"I hardly know your mom," Lena said.

Elle laughed, earning herself a tiny smile from Lena. Some of her nerves settled.

"It's… complicated," Lena said.

"Yeah," said Elle.

She looked over her shoulder. Somewhere out there, beyond the safety of the tent, her mother waited for her out in the crowd to see if Elle would live up to all of her mother's hopes for her, and those of her grandmother and great-grandmother before her.

Elle turned back to look at Lena. Out of the corner of her eye, the ocean beckoned.

"I just—my mom never got over it," she said. "I don't want to let her down now."

"She doesn't expect you to do this," Lena said. "No one does, except maybe you."

Elle looked away.

They resented being grouped together, the Eleanors, but when it came down to it, none of them dared to be too different, either. Not until after, when failure released them to be broken in their own unique ways.

It wasn't unheard of, what Lena was suggesting. Not common, but every twenty years or so there was an Eleanor who ran away or refused to enter the water. As far as Elle knew, no one tried to hunt them down and drag them back; the terms of the prophecy were clear, and sunrise was a firm deadline. Once it was past, it was past.

The water looked more blue than gray now, and there was a golden tinge to the sky.

"It's time," Lena said simply.

Elle sucked her lower lip.

It was just—she didn't think she was the chosen one, but sometimes there was something that just felt so… _magical_. You didn't have to go far to find places that had never been touched by magic, and the first breath she took when coming home, the one where it was like her lungs fully expanded for the first time since leaving, was an experience that Elle had always thought was magical.

"Whatever you're gonna do, do it now," Lena said.

"If I don't..." Elle shook her head, feeling the seconds slipping away from her. "My mom, I don't know—what if she doesn't let me stay?"

"I know a place."

"Is that where you live?"

Why couldn't she make up her mind? Whatever happened, Elle didn't want to spend the rest of her life knowing that she'd let her destiny slip past because she'd been too paralyzed by indecision to _choose_.

"No." The tent was light now, enough so that Elle could see something that looked like amusement on Lena's face. "I don't live there."

"Do you ever—I know there's no time, but one more question, please," she said, "do you wish that it had been you?

"No," Lena said flatly, without hesitation. "If this is what they do to us now, can you imagine what'll happen to the poor girl who actually does it? God, no. I don't wish it."

Outside, beyond the meager peace of the tent, the crowd was growing louder. They were waiting for her. 

Elle took one more look at the sea she'd spent so much of her life contemplating with longing and with dread, and slowly stepped back.

Time was up.

Surprise—true surprise, so easy to see in sunlight—crossed Lena's face. She cocked her head at Elle, a slow smile spreading across her face, and then she started to laugh.

Elle wasn't running away _with_ Lena. Not exactly. For all her feelings, Elle didn't really know her well enough to say that Lena was her happy ending. But Lena was right—they still had to live the rest of their lives, and she didn't want to spend those days feeling like her possibilities ended here. She'd never lived without the prophecy hanging darkly over her head. Maybe, with Lena's help, she could.

"Well," Lena said. "Okay, then."

Elle laughed too, a shaky sound meant to keep her from crying, and then gestured helplessly at the tent and the chaos that awaited her beyond it. "What do I do now?"

"Take my hand," said Lena, "and run."


End file.
